COMMON WEAKNESS ENUMERATIONDraft

CWE-1258

Exposure of Sensitive System Information Due to Uncleared Debug Information

The hardware does not fully clear security-sensitive values, such as keys and intermediate values in cryptographic operations, when debug mode is entered.

Abstraction

Base

Structure

Simple

Likelihood of Exploit

Medium

Understand the problem

What is the problem?

The hardware does not fully clear security-sensitive values, such as keys and intermediate values in cryptographic operations, when debug mode is entered.

Extended description

Security sensitive values, keys, intermediate steps of cryptographic operations, etc. are stored in temporary registers in the hardware. If these values are not cleared when debug mode is entered they may be accessed by a debugger allowing sensitive information to be accessible by untrusted parties.

Root cause

How and when does the problem arise?

Lifecycle phase

Architecture and Design

Lifecycle phase

Implementation

Risk

What does successful exploitation lead to?

Read Memory

Affected security scopes: Confidentiality

Bypass Protection Mechanism

Affected security scopes: Access Control

Defence

How is it prevented and fixed?

Architecture and Design

Architecture and design approach

Detail
Whenever debug mode is enabled, all registers containing sensitive assets must be cleared.